Chef is a popular open source infrastructure automation framework that has been popularized with the whole DevOps movement. In a nutshell, Chef has the notion of Recipe and Cookbook. A Recipe is written using a Ruby based DSL to describe how to install and configure software(s) on a host. And as the name suggest, a Cookbook is a collection of related Recipes.

Needless to say that managing Java EE Application Servers with Chef is a common use-case. You just need to use the appropriate Cookbook for your container : GlassFish, WebLogic, WildFly, TomEE, etc.

Originaly posted on The Aquarium blog.